Color transfer is a known technic consisting in modifying the COLORs of a source image by applying the COLOR palette of an example image without changing the source image structure.
A lot of color transfer method are known which consist in transferring colors between two images. One of these methods is disclosed in Frigo et al. “Optimal Transportation for Example-Guided COLOR Transfer”, Asian Conference on Computer Vision, 2014.
Such a method consists in processing separately the processing of the luminance and the chroma channels of an image. The luminance channel is addressed using a chromatic adaption transform, accounting for the illuminant change, while the chroma channels are transformed using an optimal transportation.
The chromatic adaptation transform consists in modifying the illuminant of the input image with respect to the example image illuminant. In order to do so, the color of the illuminant of the example image is estimated. The illuminant of the input image is then modified so as to adapt to the estimated illuminant of the example image.
In order to define the COLOR chroma transfer, set of modes from the input image and example image are extracted. Then, a COLOR transfer based on an optimal mapping between these two sets of modes is performed.
Such a method does not preserve the quality of the bokeh in areas of an images that are not in focus at a given depth. This results in a navigation in the depth dimension that is not smooth.
The present invention has been devised with the foregoing in mind.